Myspace Madness - The Profile With 15 Million&nbspImpressions

This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Ok, so Myspace is kind of a big deal. I mean, its the 4th most visited site on the internet, for God's sake. It's got something crazy like an average of 35 page views per unique visitor, not to mention its ability to draws its users back so consistently, day after day. With this in mind, I'd like to discuss two major things on my mind about Myspace.There are 2 major things that I think a little SEO combined with a little Myspace might help us learn.

Important information regarding the use of search engines as a navigation tool.

Some important information about Google's algorithm, and its preferences.

As for number one, I think most people would agree that a navigational search is going to produce extremely low clickthroughs. People using Google or Yahoo as a navigational tool are looking to click through to whatever site they seek easily. Most are probably simply using the Google toolbar as opposed to their address bar, or possibly just using Google search because it is their home page. To this end, someone typing in the keyword "Myspace.com" into Google, is expecting to see "Myspace.com" as the first result, which they will then click and be immediately taken to the the page they were seeking. There are, of course, 9 more results they could have chosen to click on.

But what if it were possible to convince some of those navigational searchers to click elsewhere? What if it weren't even that hard to do, and why don't we have more information about these types of searches? In my opinion, this information is extremely valuable. According to Overture, in the case of myspace.com.....are you ready for this.....there are a staggering 15,124,255 searches done per month.

Thats right. 15 MILLION. (That's like, what 3% of America?), and what's more, Google shows a sub result for the search term "Myspace.com." The result is a Myspace User Profile: www.myspace.com/jarvspace. This user's Myspace URL gets between 20-30 million impressions every month. This user has over 40,000 friends.

So, just for the hell of it, let's do some really inaccurate math. Let's say that people searching for this term only click on the sub result once every 2,000 searches. (In my opinion, this is an underestimation). In this case, the sub result would get at least 10,000 searches per month. If the conversion were significantly higher, say, once every 200 visitors, the sub result could expect to get 100,000 visitors per month. This could be possible, considering one has control of not only the title (the title of Myspace profiles is always the Myspace URL), but also the description, which is set in your user profile on Myspace, becoming the meta description tag.

In the unlikely event that you could actually somehow fool one in 50 visitors to visiting your profile, you would get nearly half a million hits a month. Perhaps this is all very unrealistic.....but how can you not marvel at the possibility of it, especially considering how simple it might be to rank in this space, and how much ranking in this place might be able to tell you. Not to mention, at the very least, your brand/site/person would have the opportunity to catch to eye of millions, and this definitely wouldn't hurt. Which brings us to our next point. If a savvy SEO managed to rank their Myspace profile in this space, what exactly might they be able to learn?

SEOs managing to rank their profiles would be able to get a good idea of the clicking behavior of navigational searchers. Is it really true that 99.999% are hellbent on clicking through to the exact page they surfed for, or is it possible to convert a good percentage with a title and description that might pique their interest?

In this instance, with Myspace, you would get a fantastic sample size, and could come to some pretty conclusive results about these users' clicking behavior (at least for the Myspace demographic, which in all fairness seems highly distractable). If found to be significant, perhaps the information gleaned from such an experiment might direct you to more carefully manipulate your own websites ranking in the SERPs for your own domain name.

In the case of seomoz.org, according to overture, there are 930 searches done a month. The results in the SERPs are as follows:

It would be incredibly easy for SEOmoz to rank for all ten terms. It probably wouldn't be too difficult to control which pages ranked where, just by adjusting they keyword "seomoz.org" within their pages. This is a great opportunity for a company to highlight an article or a page, or an idea. By manipulating this, you are essentially telling your users what page is second most important to the home page. An even more interesting scenario might be attempting to rank in your competitors results. Imagine if you could give your customers a reason to choose you over the competition before they even clicked through to your competitor's page.

In the case of SEOmoz, result numbers 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 are all for domains other than SEOmoz.org. Perhaps there's an opportunity to be had here?

As for our second point concerning Myspace;

In addition to all the potential traffic that might taken, and the possibilities for exposing your brand, website, or self to millions of people, not to mention the important information you might get about the clicking behavior of navigational surfers, there's also a great chance here to run some experiments on Google's ranking algorithm. In the case of ranking a Myspace profile for the search term "myspace.com," there are essentially three major factors that could be manipulated with a degree of precision. The first, obviously, is backlinks to the profile page itself. The second is the use of the keyword "Myspace.com" on the profile page, and the third is on page optimization. On page optimization within Myspace is severely limited. Essentially, you have little control over site architecture, and must work within the confines of the templating system they have prepared. Each profile should receive the same benefit of the trust of the domain itself, leaving you the ability to control rankings based mostly just on two factors:

The mention of the domain (both on the page and in the title--It would be interesting to see how strongly the title tag might influence these rankings. I expect this would be a major factor).

The quality and number of backlinks.

You could, of course, run these experiments on your own domain, but the huge number of pages Google has to choose from in ranking Myspace profile pages, and the similar architecture of those pages, presents an interesting scenario for ranking tests to be run. Not to mention, the payout on these type of tests could be great for your brand or business. So, what do you guys think? Is there fertile ground here for gaining some additional knowledge? How about for brand exposure? Who will be the first one to rank their company for "Myspace.com?"

Lastly, keep an eye out for part 2 of Myspace Madness, where i'll talk about the MAJOR security flaws STILL affecting Myspace that make stealing your cookies (and profile) as simple as 1-2-3. In other words...watch where you click.

-Dan Tynski

About DanielTynski —
I am a marketing consultant with over 7 years experience creating high-impact content strategies that build links, drive traffic, and retain audiences.

Guys! (and gals) Who cares who Jarvis is! The idea of my post was to highlight the fact that the guy did barely anything to rank for as the second most important myspace.com page. WHat are your thoughts on that? and the potential of taking over his position?

I think he did do things, but didn't necessarily realize what he was doing was optimization. There are certainly links pointing to the page, but like you mentioned there are other profiles with more links pointing to them. Of course Jarvis may be the profile with the most quality links. I noticed at least oe from the New York Times.

It likely the use of myspace.com on the page plays some role, though I assume a brand new profile with no links wouldn't be #2 until it did acquire a fair amount of links. And it really could come down to the quality of Jarvis's links.

I suppose it's easy enough to test by setting up a prolfile and using myspace.com in varying amounts.

As for taking over his place I would think the difficulty would depend on how many links might be necessary to overtake Jarvis. Any of us should be able to optimize the page itself. We should be able to get the links in time too, but obviously not right away.

How about a mildly viral article about myspace.com? I have a feeling creating the backlinks would be no problem at all, especially if you could create an article with the keyword in the title. In fact, maybe there should be a little SEO contest to see? Anyone else be interested?

You know you might be right. When you think about it most people aren't likely to be optimizing their profile page for the term myspace.com. MySpace itself would be, but we're not worried about being #1 here. #2 is the goal and if you were to actively optimize you probably could get there without too much effort.

WOW, great post daniel, impressive research. I think it would be absolutely worth manipulating. I'm already looking foward to part 3 where you tell us about your new myspace page with 50842 friends (what I see Jarvis at) and some of the results of carrying this out. I can guarantee you one, so maybe you only need 50841. Good Luck!

The other question I have is why is it Jarvis who is the sub result? I just checked Tom, (myspace.com/tom) and he is at considerably more than that: Tom has 170743506 friends. I wonder if Jarvis is even the highest 'friend-haver' or if this result is do more to real SEO manipulation i.e. a concerted effort as you outlined above. More research ensues.....

Jarvis has a sizable number of backlinks - check yahoo site explorer...somewhere in the 3,000 range. There are other users who have more backlinks...but Jarvis his a higher frequency of the word "myspace.com" appearing in his pages.... I suspect this is a major reason. Thus the need for someone to rank their own page and learn even more.

I am seeing about 3,000 as well. Now where did I put that keyword rankings report (V.2) so I can see if this example is matching up with what theyve said. Thanks for lighting the fire on this one, it is a very intriguing example and as you say, seems ripe for use by savvy operators.

I really can't believe that such a user unfriendly website and ugly one as well can make such a succes. here in the netherlands we have a dutch version of myspace called hyves its really just like space, even slower than myspace.

sorry if this comment is a bit off-topic i just wanted to show my hate of such sites haha ;) i do got respect for succes so also for myspace ;)

I agree, when i first visited a myspace profile page (or blog or whatever it is), my screwn was completely warped, and I could scroll as much to the right as I could downwards. Nothing was organised and I had no idea what was going on.

I was so frustrated that I had to prevent anyone I know from going to myspace.com. Unfortunately, my attempts to stop people going failed and well, now every minute of the day a new eye sore gets produced on myspace

Interesting post Daniel and I'll be looking forward to the next one. It doesn't get discussed a lot, but I think one of the ways to take advanatge of social media is by building strong profiles to extend the reach of your brand.

I can't say I now who Jarvis Cocker is, but I gather from the comments here he's a musician. That makes MySapce a natural for him Traffic or not the same profile might not work as well on a different social site that is less focused on music.

I did some research into his solo work before I saw Cocker - playing Pulp tracks - a fortnight ago; V Festival! Gold Coast, it was great!

What Daniel failed to recognise is that Jarvis doesn't have his own site (eg. jarviscocker.com) and that his online identity is based solely on MySpace.

Jarvis got lucky in that he ranks #2 for "Jarvis Cocker" (below his wiki entry) and #1 for "myspace.com" as bloggers, magazines or anyone else for that matter has to backlink to myspace.com/jarvspace and not his own site.

Could this be a feasible reason not to move away from community maintained profiles? (eg. Blogger, WordPress.com, MySpace, etc.)?

It sure seems to be working for him, it would take some work to move the value of that profile page to an external site. But again my question is just how much "SEO" is being done to that profile page, is it really just dumb luck?

I'm not sure I'd say that's all luck. Jarvis still needs to be doing something right to get anyone to link to him, whether he's actively building links or just talented enough for people to want to talk about him it's still work. It might be the only place anyone can link to, but he still gave them some reason to link to him.

I do think it's a good idea to take advanatge of the domain authority of sites like MySpace. Would Jarvis be getting the same traffic if all his efforts were focused on his own site and he didn't have the MySpace profile? Probably not, though you'd think he'd be able to rank well for his name, especially if he had the domain jarviscocker.com

You're right, dumb luck isn't the right word for it, obviously he is talented at what he does and people care enough to link etc... I was more wondering if the results he is getting are solely from that, or if in fact there is some optimization work being done.

I'm not sure I can tell. I looked at his profile, but I assume there's only so much he could do with that. It looked like so many other MySpace profiles I've seen so I left right away.

The links I looked at seemed like they were natural. A lot of music related sites.

Something tells me there's not a lot of optimization going on and he got known whether through MySpace or other channels and as people found him they wanted to link to his profile since they liked his music.

All just a guess on my part. It would be interesting to find out, though

Wow, this is certainly interesting. Must be the combination of the backlinks and by luck getting thekeyword density just right. I set up a Myspace simply for a quick & dirty backlink. I backinked to it with "internet idiocy" and presto my profile comes up for that term of course, although beating the internetidiocy.com domain with a single backlink kind of surprises me. Although Googles datacentres seem to be in a state of rather random flux at the minute.

Now I'm thinking there's a lot more mileage to what can be done with it - become "friends" with as many of the heavy hitters on there perhaps?